Israel has made no secret of it: it has embarked on a genocidal plan to “create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable.” And Joe Biden is its accomplice.
by Seth Ackerman
Part 4 - “A Textbook Case of Genocide”
There is a consensus among scholars of genocide that ethnic cleansing does not automatically imply genocide, but that the two often go together. According to Omer Bartov, an Israeli American professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, “Functionally and rhetorically we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide, as has happened more than once in the past.” From this he concludes that “the possibility of genocide is staring us in the face.”
There are many signs that this is already happening. Reports are multiplying of point-blank field executions of civilians by Israeli troops, such as a December 13 incident in which, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to Al Jazeera, “women, children, and babies were killed execution-style by Israeli forces” while they were sheltering inside the Shadia Abu Ghazala in northern Gaza. Or a December 19 incident, confirmed by the UN, in which soldiers “summarily killed at least 11 unarmed Palestinian men in front of their family members in Al Remal neighbourhood, Gaza City”:
The IDF allegedly separated the men from the women and children, and then shot and killed at least 11 of the men, mostly aged in their late 20’s and early 30’s, in front of their family members. The IDF then allegedly ordered the women and children into a room, and either shot at them or threw a grenade into the room, reportedly seriously injuring some of them, including an infant and a child.
These reports can hardly be surprising: the Israeli command authorities have clearly communicated to their troops that the objective of the war is to rid Gaza of Palestinians. The defense minister has announced, “I have released all the restraints.” Moshe Saada, a member of Netanyahu’s party who sits on the National Security Committee of the Knesset, recently rejoiced that even left-leaning Israelis now agree on the need for a policy of extermination: “Former colleagues who once “fought with me on political matters,” he said, now “tell me, ‘Moshe, it is clear that all the Gazans need to be destroyed.’”
This is why other genocide experts, such as the Israeli historian Raz Segal, endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University, are more definitive than Bartov. “What we’re seeing in front of our eyes is a textbook case of genocide,” Segal said. The same terms were used by Craig Mokhiber, the New York director of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a thirty-year veteran aid official, who called Gaza “a textbook case of genocide” in his October 28 resignation letter. Fifteen UN special rapporteurs — senior independent experts who are neither employed by the UN nor nominated by any government — released a statement in November calling the situation a “genocide in the making.”
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